Mac Vs. Windows. The age long battle, has been fought in advertising, on store shelves, and amongst computer users for a long time now. The arguments we can all say from memorys. Windows has more software, more hardware offerings, are less expensive, are more prevalant. Mac’s are more stable, produce better graphics, are more secure. Not anymore. Mac users have officially lost the right to say more secure. They no longer can claim that they can’t be hacked, and they definitely need to start looking into anti-virus solutions.
There are tons of articles floating around the net right now about the iBotnet, the unfortuante result of installing pirated copies of iWork09. Yes I know, not everyone installs pirated software. Not everyone even knows how to get pirated software. That is not the point.
The point being that Mac’s have been so “secure” because noone felt they were worth writing malware for. With the growing popularity and large visibility Apple has been getting lately, its no surprise that something like this has happened. Yes this one might only affect a very small ammount of people, but now that proof of concept has been delivered, and now that one piece of malware has been made and put into the wild, the real question is how long until the copy cats start?
Look at the world of Windows malware, and you will find so much of it is variants. People download the original code, and modify it, making it meaner, nastier, more eveasive, easier to distribute. Do you really think that won’t happen with Mac malware? Are you that naive?
I’m a PC user. I have my Windows machines, and my Linux boxes. I’d love to have a Mac so I can learn it inside out. I don’t see any problem with Mac except that it is too expensive for my tastes. Well, now that you really should get AV for it, and like any other real software for Mac it costs because access to the APIs are all controlled by Apple and they charge a lot for that sort of access, it will cost more, plus that OSX is built on a *nix (Unix/Linux) system, well I guess I’ll wait longer.
Welcome to the real world my Mac friends.